Lost: That ’70s Show

So, this is embarrassing.

Last week, despite watching the episode twice, I missed something major. I was so busy taking notes I managed to totally not notice that Locke, Caesar, et al had landed on the smaller Hydra station island rather than the main island, where Jack, Kate and Hurley had landed. After J.B. alerted me to the rather obvious clues pointing to that, I decided to watch this week’s episode all the way through once without taking notes. So this means you might miss out on some of my more insightful commentary on the characters’ wardrobes. If you wish to blame J.B. for this, you have my permission to do so.

But anyway, I’m glad I concentrated on this one, because it was the best episode in a long, long time.

The basics:

Yes, it’s more plot cheating via time-travel. But this time, we don’t just spend a couple of minutes getting a vague sense of where we are, like in that episode with Ellie and Lil’ Widmore.  This time, we really get to know the era.

The teaser takes us a few episodes back, to when Sawyer, Juliet, Miles, and Jin bade farewell to Locke as he fell into the Orchid well. Turns out Locke really did fix the time-warping problem; however, our crew is now stuck in 1974. They resolve to wait for Locke to come back for “as long as it takes” – and then we get a title card that says “Three Years Later.” Awesome!

So what happened was, in 1974, Sawyer et al did a good deed for some Dharma folks, lied about how they got to the island, and wound up being accepted into the Dharma Initiative. As of 1977, Sawyer is now Jim LaFleur, head of Dharma security. Juliet is a mechanic who changes her clothes a lot and secretly knows how to deliver babies. Oh, yeah, and they’re an item. Also, Jin’s English is much much much better, Miles is still just as useless as he’s been in every episode since that one where Locke stuck a grenade in his mouth, and Sawyer can barely remember what Kate looks like. We don’t see Daniel at all, so I assume he’s stalking Pierre Chang and Lil’ Charlotte.

They’re all remarkably okay with being stuck in the 70s, which I guess makes sense if your perception of the world has been destroyed from having been stuck on this island for five seasons. For the record, I would not want to randomly go back in time 30 years. In 1974, “women’s lib” was still a novelty. And I’m pretty sure we’ve yet to see a non-white Dharma; that is, until Jin and Miles came along.

Anyway, Jin has been spending the past three years searching the island for Locke and the Oceanic Six. At the end of the episode he finds the newly landed Jack, Kate, and Hurley, which we already saw.  Sawyer goes out to meet them, and they stare at each other awkwardly for a while.

The good:

• There’s a cool scene where Sawyer and Juliet interfere in an intense showdown between two Hostiles/Others and two picnicking Dharmas that results in the deaths of three extras. The Hostiles/Others look like scary guys from a 70s horror movie. (Or from my hometown circa 1995. My hometown was slow to evolve.)
• Richard, predictably, is there in 1974, and his hair is short. I don’t know the timeline well enough to know what that means, but I’m always happy to see Richard. (Although I’m not clear on why Richard strikes me as so much more trustworthy than everyone else. He’s killed people too, and he engineered or at least helped with the Purge of all the Dharma folks back in the 90s or whenever that happened. And yet, Richard seems like a good guy, whereas Ben is clearly a sociopath and Widmore just seems like a jerk.)
• This time, unlike in previous seasons, the Dharmas don’t come off as ridiculous hippie stereotypes. They seem smart and capable and not even all that naïve. Yay for three-dimensional characters!
• Sawyer looks a lot better when he’s showering regularly.

The bad:

• … For once, I got almost nothin’. Even Juliet didn’t bother me this week. I’ve been resisting it all season, but now that it’s actually happening, the Sawyer/Juliet romance is really pretty cool.
• Also, Daniel has gone coo-coo for Coco Puffs since Charlotte’s death. Remember how I said I thought he would be more interesting with a dead girlfriend than a live one? I retract that. I much preferred him vaguely sane to vaguely insane. I’ve seen Jeremy Davies play both before – all his characters are somewhat fluid on the sanity spectrum – and I much preferred him in, say, Saving Private Ryan to Solaris.
• Oh, and there’s a Dharma flunky in the teaser, Phil, who is played by Patrick Fischler, who played Jimmy Barrett in season 2 of Mad Men.  He was amazing on Mad Men, and he has a very distinctive look about him that I fear has ruined the actor for me. This isn’t really a bad point for the episode, but it was majorly distracting. I had to watch the teaser, like, three times before I could stop staring at Jimmy and listen to the dialogue.

The stuff that will matter next week:

• It’s unclear where the romances stand between Jack and Kate and Sawyer and Juliet. Sawyer and Juliet seem to be quite happy and coupley in their Dharma house, and Sawyer claims to be over Kate, but by the time she’s standing in front of him at the close of the episode, he doesn’t necessarily look all that sure. Whatever. I would like to request that we all move on with our lives and forget about this quadrangle, please.
• Daniel says that they’re never going to time-warp again, and that it’s okay now for them to get involved in what’s going on amongst this time zone’s inhabitants. “It doesn’t matter what we do. Whatever happened, happened,” Daniel says. “Yeah, thanks anyway, Plato,” says Sawyer, and me. Surely they’re not going to be in the 70s for the rest of the series. It’s fun for now, but we’ve still got a season and a half to watch.
• The pop-up-video re-airing of last week’s episode prior to the airing of this one said Locke’s death was listed as a suicide in the obituary Jack read. Which doesn’t explain why Jack told Mrs. Hawking three episodes ago that he hadn’t known Locke committed suicide. Either someone messed up the pop-up or Jack lied to Mrs. Hawking.

My assumptions going into next week: The Oceanic Five time-warped into the 70s, but Sayid and Sun are in a different place on the island, because they want to put off the Jin/Sun reunion for a special episode and because we’re going to learn something very interesting about the reason Sayid agreed to come back. The rest of the people on their flight, including, interestingly, Locke and Ben, are in 2007, on the smaller island. However, I don’t care in the slightest what those guys are doing (although I’m sure we’ll find out soon anyway).

Season 5, Episode 8: LaFleur (originally aired March 4, 2009)

For another take on this episode, check out LaFleur Don’t Know Nothin’ ‘Bout Birthin’ Babies by J.B. Perlow.

For more on Lost, click here.

Wednesdays, 9/8c on ABC

Photographs courtesy of ABC